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Rabbi Rick Jacobs: American Judaism in Israel RABBI RICK JACOBS: AMERICAN JUDAISM IN ISRAEL HOLO: Welcome to the College Commons Bully Pulpit podcast, Torah With a Point of View. Produced by the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion, America’s first Jewish institution of higher learning. My name is Joshua Holo, your host, and Dean of the Jack H. Skirball campus in Los Angeles. It is my great pleasure to welcome my friend and colleague, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, President of the Union for Reform Judaism, and more importantly alumnus of this campus of the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion. Rick, it’s a great pleasure to have you. Thank you for joining us. JACOBS: Josh, it is a great pleasure to be back here in L.A. First of all, look outside. The sun is shining. It’s warm. People are smiling. I can’t imagine why I left the L.A. campus or Southern California. HOLO: …the same thing. JACOBS: I know. I know, but it’s a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. HOLO: Well, we’re glad you got your money’s worth already. And it’s great to have you. JACOBS: More than that. HOLO: We’re going to talk about Israel today. I want to start by asking you if there’s a difference between our interest in thinking about Israel and Zionism from the liberal perspective and our approach to Israel and Zionism from the Reform Movemental perspective. JACOBS: Well I think the distinction between liberal and Reform is an important distinction. I think that we’re trying to re-sculpt both. I think what it means to be a liberal Zionist today is something that is embattled. I think there are plenty of people who would say, you know, liberal, again, we can get inside liberal, you know, liberal Jew, liberal political. What does it mean to be a person who not only loves the State of Israel but loves what it promises, and what it sometimes delivers, and what it is failing? And how to instill a Reform Movement’s deep love, I would even say an unconditional love for the State of Israel, at the same time be deeply committed to repair and improve and to partner and to be so engaged that we don’t walk away, but so engaged that we lean in more closely? HOLO: As an expression of that love. Not as a mitigation of it. JACOBS: Absolutely. I think both are in need of some reflection, some orienting, and we have to figure out how do we plant the Reform Zionist the feeling, commitment inside of little Rabbi Rick Jacobs: American Judaism In Israel 1 ones, in our students, within our wider movement. And it was once upon a time it just happened. It was part of the mother’s milk. Was part of the water we drank. It’s not that. And Israel has become so embattled in so many it often times is the thing that we avoid because we’re trying to build a larger sense of unity. HOLO: And insofar as we’re speaking from the left side of the spectrum, so to speak, with a liberal side for lack of a better term, it also becomes embattled insofar as Zionism as a term has been wedded to the right, and has been divorced from our mother’s-milk consciousness. Before the ’90s or the ‘80s maybe we actually associated Zionism with liberalism. And we had notions of socialist Zionism. JACOBS: Absolutely. And I think one of the conversations or arguments I can have on any given day with Israeli political leaders is that they will define very often a very narrow circle of what it means to be pro-Israel. I said, “If you draw the circle that narrowly, you’re going to miss not only the largest slice, but an incredibly devoted and committed slice.” But they’re not going to agree with lots of current public policy, but they will agree the State of Israel is one of the great gifts and one of the most powerful realities of Jewish life. But I think we have seen also in our communal discussion here in North America we’ve also drawn a very narrow – if you’re not aligned with these policy stances then you are not pro-Israel. And even if you argue with whether it’s pluralism or issues that are threatening the democracy, those are things in an embattled moment that we can’t question. And publicly we have an old conversation. It’s worn out. It’s tired. We need to be able to constructively engage, and particularly with people that have Zionist and Jewish views that are not shared but there’s a bigger something that we share, a sense of Klal Yisrael (the Jewish collective) a sense of Am Yisrael (the Jewish people). And if we can’t instill that, I’m fearful for the Judaism that we practice. HOLO: When you’re speaking to a group that you consider most your people, however you define that, Reform Movement, insiders, liberals, whatever it is that most is our crowd, what is the Zionist political challenge that you face most aggressively, that you have to confront? And then once you confront that how do you refashion that conversation that you’re saying is tired? JACOBS: I think for too long the question is an argument. It’s not actually a conversation. You know, we start in such a place of deep discussion about whether it’s settlements or two- state solution, or what are the true pillars of a democratic Jewish state. And I think it’s trying to step back from that and saying, “What’s my connection with this whole enterprise?” Is it the headline that makes me connected? Is it the issues, the challenges? Or do I actually have - I spent my junior year abroad in the ‘70s in Israel. And I went to Hebrew University. And I walked into David Hartman’s seminar on Maimonides, Spinoza and Halevi. All of a sudden, here’s this Modern Orthodox thinker makes Aliyah with his five kids, and he opens up a world of possibility that I start to say, you know, I need to open my Jewish life and my, you know, kind of Israel life to a much broader cross-section. And I, like that’s when the spark goes up. I lived on an Orthodox kibbutz. And I coached a wonderful high school basketball team of edot mizrah (Jewish communities from the Arab world and east of Israel) kids, in a part of Jerusalem that’s now a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) neighborhood. So I have a connection that’s so personal and it’s so, you know, on a human level that it helps me to Rabbi Rick Jacobs: American Judaism In Israel 2 transform the political arguments and the deep divisiveness right now in our discourse in Israel and among our communal leaders here. I find that we’re not paying attention to how are we going to cultivate that. The Seventies are different than the 21st century. And if you’re 20 years old today trying to forge that connection, it’s a very difficult enterprise. And I think we can’t start with issues. We’ve got to start with what is my experience of the community there, in its complexity, in its beauty, in its inspiration, and in its maddening qualities as well. HOLO: So I get the personal. I get that. But what if people on the left, again, appreciating that that’s a complicated generalization, what if they readily connect emotionally but they find a painful, and to them, seemingly impossible disconnect between the personal connection and Israel? Or, even more complicatedly, with Zionism itself? What do we do about Jews who are questioning not 1967, so to speak, but 1948? JACOBS: I think it’s not personal. And that if you have a close relationship you can have the most dysfunctional political reality and you won’t be bothered by it. No, you’ll be bothered deeply by it. But there’s an underpinning to it that you can’t walk away from. So I like to think of it here in North America, how do we construct a sense that I’m connected to Am Yisrael (people Israel)? That I’m not just a Reform Jew. Not just a Reform leader. I’ve could actually have a relationship with people who are very different, think very differently, pray very differently, vote very differently, and have a very different view of the Jewish state. I think for many people Israel is that very difficult challenge to having a broader experience of peoplehood. And we in the Reform Movement we were much more comfortable in 19th century terms with the religiosity, with values, with texts. And that became the underpinning. And all these complicated people who also are part of the tribes of Israel, oh my gosh, that’s really hard to come to grips with. I’ll just give you a story. So I was in a wonderful community in Westchester, New York. And my Orthodox colleague down the road at Young Israel called me up on Erev Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year’s Eve). He said, “Rick, I did it.” I said, “What do you mean you did it? You finished your sermon for Rosh Hashana? What did you do?” He goes, “No, I did it. I finally did it.” I said, “What?” He said, “I finally got my Orthodox colleagues to redraw the map of the eruv (Sabbath boundary, within which you can do certain activities on the Sabbath that you could not otherwise do on the Sabbath) in our community to include your congregation Westchester Reform Temple.” He worked for years.
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